♪ oh oh ♪ and it is you that's on my computer screen 'cause it's you that's on my mind ♪ ♪ and it is you that's on my computer screen 'cause it's you that's on my mind ♪ ♪ 'cause it's you that's on my mind ♪ [ cheers and applause ] >> jimmy: big boi's album is called "vicious lies and dangerous rumors". it's out now. i want to thank big boi, rob lowe, bryce harper, and apologize to matt damon. we did run out of time for him. tomorrow night, ray romano, amy brenneman and music from phillip phillips. good night.

tonight on "nightline," angry in america. a viral rant against gun control thrust him into the national spotlight, and that's just the beginning. >> barack obama is definitely an unconstitutional criminal. >> tonight, a day in the life of shock jock alex jones. the new facebook. an exclusive look behind the scenes as facebook launches a brand-new feature that might transform the world's biggest social network. knitting behind bars. we show you what happens when two retirees head to prison to teach the virtues of needles and yarn.(kxañ;ñ;x;x;x$x

from new york city, this is "nightline" with cynthia mcfadden. >> good evening, i'm cynthia mcfadden. tonight we begin with america and its guns, as president obama prepares to announce his sweeping plan to curb gun violence tomorrow, across the country millions have already rushed out to buy a record number of new guns. and one man who thinks that's a very good thing, radio shock jock alex jones. he made national headlines last week with a fiery pro-gun tirade that quickly went viral, and that's not all he's got to say. here is abc's dan harris. >> reporter: are you for hitler or against hitler? whatever they say is the opposite. they never tell the truth. >> reporter: tonight as millions of americans worry about the government taking away their guns, this man, alex jones, is pushing a lot of buttons. >> and i'm here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms. we will not relinquish them.

do you understand? >> reporter: when alex jones went on cnn's piers morgan to discuss gun control in the wake of the sandy hook massacre -- >> you're a hatchet man of the new world order. >> reporter: he created a sensation. this video went massively viral. >> you think you're a tough guy? have me back with a boxing ring in here. >> reporter: who is alex jones? >> we've got abc nightly news/"nightline" here. >> reporter: jones agreed to let us into his world for a day. >> we're just soldiers looking to cross each other on the picket line here. america has been captured. america has been robbed. we are now being looted like a third world nation. well, i'm not going to sit down and shut up. >> reporter: jones is arguably the nation's premier purveyor of what they call paranoia porn.

>> i'm live in 30 seconds. >> reporter: out of his studios near austin, texas, his radio show and webcast reach an estimated one million people a day. >> this federal intrusion is out of control. >> reporter: and on youtube and elsewhere, jones estimates 200 million people have seen his various documentaries. >> you're not our gods or our masters! >> reporter: with titles like "the fall of the republic," "end game blueprint for enslavement", and "the obama depression." do you believe everything you say? >> i believe all of it. >> reporter: none of it is a schtick? >> no, it's all true. >> reporter: you think obama is a criminal? >> barack obama is definitely an unconstitutional criminal. >> reporter: jones espouses a litany of conspiracy theories although he thinks that term belittles his reporting. fema is running concentration camps? >> yes. they have designated fields for the american people during a

civil uprising. >> reporter: the government is poisoning the water? >> absolutely. i have all these other government documents where the document proposes and government think tanks propose poisoning the water to dumb down the population, make them more easily manageable. >> reporter: 9/11 was an inside job? >> yes, 9/11 was an inside job. it was a staged event that launched the iraq war and set up a domestic police state in the united states. >> all i'm calling for is a real investigation and the people of oklahoma city have been calling for an investigation. >> reporter: jones, who's 38, got his start with a local cable access show in the 1990s. he now has a huge fan base, which at various times has included celebrities like willy nelson, jesse ventura, charlie sheen. >> we want our nation back and we're calling on each and every american citizen to stand up and demand the truth. >> reporter: and reality stars spencer pratt and heidi montag. >> spencer pratt, good to have you on with us today. >> thank you so much. i'm so honored to be on with you. you are a true legend, a true

american patriot. >> look in the mirror. >> reporter: he does have vociferous visitics, including experts who monitor hate groups who worry about his influence during a tough time in america. however, jones sometimes seems to latch on to small pieces of information to prove his much larger, more sinister theories. for example, while we're here, he says this about an article he found on cnn.com. >> and they recommend having a one-child policy. >> reporter: and i looked up the article, and i have it. i can pull it up for you. it's actually a fluffy feature piece interviewing a woman who wrote a semi-jokey book about having environmentally friendly sex, in which she talks about doing dating -- >> and it slipped in there. it says we might want a one-child policy. >> reporter: yeah, but it was a sarcastic aside. >> see, it's all sarcastic. but see, we've got from there's

no move for a world government, it doesn't exist, nuts to talk about it, to you can't prove the world government being formed is murderous. >> reporter: i'm not even granting you that there's even a world government being formed. >> that's why you're discredited. >> reporter: we found that when you turn the cameras off, jones is a pretty calm, friendly guy. alex, how can you play football with the enemy? we went to dinner with him and discussed a wide range of topics outside of government. so your son knows the word propaganda? >> yes. >> reporter: a 7-year-old? that's what happens when you're alex jones's son. >> the most important thing is he knows everybody has an agenda, including myself. >> reporter: he is a man with an agenda. one that after this remarkable interview -- >> i probably have more than 50

firearms. i sleep very comfortably outside austin, texas. >> reporter: is now being scrutinized very closely. for "nightline," this is dan harris in new york. well, next up, a behind-the-scenes look at facebook's brand-new search tool that could revolutionize the way millions use the social network. a "nightline" exclusive. i paint people from my life mostly.

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today all eyes were on facebook as the social network finally unveiled the new project

that, until today, had been shrouded in mystery. no, it's not the phone so many have speculated about, but a new social search tool that threatens to invade the turf of google, linkedin and yelp. facebook thinks it could change the way their billion users interact online, and abc's david wright brings us this exclusive behind-the-scenes look. >> reporter: today at facebook headquarters, founder mark zuckerberg launched a new era for the social networking site. >> one of the older traditions that we have at facebook. >> reporter: by holding up a gong. this little ritual happens only at big product launches of facebook, marking the moment the new product goes online. facebook's tantalizingly vague announcement just come and see what we're building. >> people guess search engine. guessed facebook gifts. guessed a facebook phone. >> reporter: led to a frenzy of

speculation about what it might be. >> maybe a standalone ipad app. >> reporter: not quite. facebook gave "nightline" exclusive access to what they've really been building, a rare behind-the-scenes look at a product that could change people's daily habits online. graph search, a powerful tool with an uninspiring name, a search engine like no other. >> so this is just some really neat stuff. this is one of the coolest things that i think that we've done in a while. >> reporter: until now, facebook has been sort of a high-tech scrapbook people constantly update and share with their friends. but it's really a giant data base, a billion people voluntarily sharing their likes and dislikes, voluntarily sharing 240 billion photos, voluntarily forging a trillion connections between all those items. until now, you could browse only one page at a time. now the whole data base is searchable, along with all those connections. is this facebook trying to get into the google business?

>> a little bit. >> reporter: if you think of google as the yellow pages, the encyclopedia and the almanac all rolled into one, basic answers to basic questions, facebook's new search tool is something far more personal. here you get biased results. >> people are used to doing searches on the web, say, for a plumber. but you're not used to saying show me all the plumbers that my friends like. that's almost like a holy grail, in some cases, for anybody who's ever tried to find somebody that they trust and they really want recommendations from other people that they know, because oftentimes you can't really tap into all your friends that way. >> reporter: depending on your friends and interests, some of your search results will be different from mine. what makes this different from a traditional web search is that the results are personalized to you based on you and your friends. so if i type "tv shows my friends like," the results that come up for me are world news, "nightline," "good morning america."

go figure. thankfully, the new tool isn't limited to just your friends. you actually search all of the data publicly shared on facebook. >> let's say i want to check out if there are any italian restaurants in los angeles. >> reporter: project manager kate o'neill showed us how you can filter the search further by cuisine, by location, even by your friends' recommendations. >> that los angeles restaurant that residents have visited, that my friends have visited, and here we have one restaurant that i may want to check out. >> reporter: i can say firsthand that's a great spot. >> that's great to hear. >> reporter: the pockets are endless and sometimes amusing. while they were dog fooding the tool, that's using it only amongst facebook employees, someone thought to plug in music liked by people who like mitt romney. top result, johnny cash. >> i can change mitt romney to barack obama. >> reporter: top results there, michael jackson. are you hoping someday this will replace google or not? >> that's not -- i don't think that's the way we think about

it. the way we thought about it is there's all this stuff that you shared about yourself, that you shared about your friends, that you shared about the world around you and we're trying to unlock the value of that. and to make it all searchable. >> reporter: now you can collect together all your favorite photos of friends and family. or ask it to show you all the photos of those people from long ago. content personalized just to you. for now, the tool is limited just to four basic categories. people, photos, places, and interests. >> you can't search for things, for example, like posts, events. those things are not currently included in this early version of graph search. >> reporter: will they be someday? >> yes, they will be someday. if i, for example, met someone at a party, didn't catch their last name, but we talked a long time and i got a bunch of information in the course of the conversation, i could actually do a search like this. so people named russ who live in

san francisco and are friends with tom. and here, i'm getting back this person that i talked to, russ, he's a designer, we met at a party. >> reporter: did you really? sparks flew? >> no, not like that. but russ is actually married. >> reporter: well, you get the idea. >> facebook has digitized people and digitized our connections, not just with each other, but also with people, places and things. and now this is a glimmer to what you can do with that. >> new ways to waste time at home and at the office. >> you can say that, although interestingly you can also say that people have been wasting time on facebook before and this actually might make them more productive in some ways. >> reporter: quicker to find out. >> exactly. >> reporter: facebook has been careful to reassure people the new tool respects all the privacy restrictions people put on their data. the engineers say that's one thing that made this project a challenge. most of them, about 50 in all,

have been locked in this room for a month. >> reporter: how many of you have slept here at least one night while this thing has been in progress? and how many of you have partners at home that are ready to kill you right now? today the lockdown officially ended, the celebrations began. by the time they all get home, their friends and family, among the first to get this new toy, may be spending even more time on facebook. i'm david wright for "nightline." >> well, as of tonight, graph search is already available to a limited number of facebook users and will gradually be extended to everybody. >>. just ahead, doing hard time with needles and yarn? the unlikely success of knitting behind bars. it doesn't matter which of our great states folks visit.

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well, what do you think about hardened criminals serving time behind bars, you probably don't think about knitting. but in one prison in maryland, two retirees are turning dozens of convicts into converts with the help of yarn, needles and the zen of the stitch. >> reporter: barbed wire fences,

watchmen towers and a group of men with convictions. hardened criminals. this is no white-collar country club. >> i'm arrested for armed kidnapping. >> attempted murder. >> reporter: but listen a little closer. >> i love knitting. >> reporter: and you realize there's more here than meets the eye. >> i'm knitting a small hat for a kid. >> reporter: that softer side appears every thursday around dusk. with two unusual visitors to the pre-release unit in jessup, maryland. meet lynn and sheila. you wanted to give knitting needles to hardened criminals. is that a good idea? >> for a man to have picked up needles to walk through that door, to say come on, let me teach you thousahow to knit, to respond to knitting, they've shown themselves as open people. >> reporter: would male inmates have interest in a hobby

traditionally for women? >> wrap it around. >> reporter: lynn and sheila still remember the department of corrections' initial response. >> they don't want to knit. what makes you think men want to knit? i said they want to knit. they just don't know they want to knit. >> you like it, right? >> reporter: nearly three years later, the ladies have taught more than 100 prisoners to knit while dozens remain on a waiting list. some of the inmates have even skipped dinner to make class. >> i feel calm. it gives you a peace of mind. it definitely do that. give you a peace of mind. takes you away from present. >> reporter: something to focus on. >> pretty much. >> reporter: nellie proctor compares it to hanging out in the starbucks. >> this is like starbucks, without the coffee. >> reporter: just chilling? >> just chilling. enjoying the day. gets you away from the penitentiary lifestyle. >> reporter: there will be people that will see this story and might feel like you should do hard time, and going to a knitting class might not sort of fit their idea of what serving a

jail sentence should be. what would you say to them? >> i'm doing something constructive. i could be doing a lot worse. to be honest with you. i could be running amuck, being a pain in the behind. i come in here to relax. they should try it and they'll understand. >> reporter: lynn and sheila give all the men a five-minute knitting lesson she swears she can teach anyone. i had one of the guys put me through the paces. wrap it around. you have to say it. everything they knit goes to charitable causes, like these hats for students at troubled inner city schools. >> you know, we did a lot of wrong in society, so i guess this is a way of giving back. >> reporter: do you think you'll continue knitting when you get out? >> probably, in the house when i'm bored, i might do about 30 stitches. >> reporter: lynn and sheila say they've seen their students change for the better. >> these guys are getting out. they can